C'mon get happy! Sometimes it's well and good to wave the flag of home-town pride and condemn New York City as an overhyped, overcrowded, unholy chore to drive through. Other times, you've got to get the fuck out of Boston.

A fighter's chance In a messy Allston kitchen, in unison, a mob of about 20 or 30 persons start screaming at the Old Edison. And as is their custom, the Old Edison shout right back. Welcome to a typical Old Edison performance, but please watch your step.

Alive Records (2011) An approximately 90-year-old ex-convict has persuaded hipsters everywhere to pretend to give a fuck about Mississippi blues, and that’s not even the most interesting thing about T-Model Ford.

Claw Solutions (2010) The one-sheet for Hex Map's debut consists of a vague numeral code and an infograph of angular, multi-colored lines connecting to overlapping circles that match songs with their amalgamations of spiritual antecedents.

Self-released (2010) If your judgment on Love in Stockholm were based solely on their penchant for matching suits and shades, their humble origins as BU undergrads who formed a band in order to obtain "free beer and girls," and their parody video of the Lonely Island's "I'm on a Boat," you'd conclude that they're tools.

Reigniting powerlines As sagas of rock-and-roll near-misses go, there's a cinematic quality to Runner and the Thermodynamics, who in the early 2000s channeled their reverence for '70s arena rock into a power-pop detonation that briefly cracked the glass ceiling of the music biz.

Metropolis Records (2010) If you disregard the distorted guitars, the spooky sound effects, and the unapologetically gothtarded imagery, not much separates the Birthday Massacre from honest-to-gosh bumblegum pop.

Putting the "zzzzzzzzz" into Ozzfest "Vampires are bullshit. I'm the Prince of fucking Darkness," Ozzy Osbourne informed Kristen Stewart during a pop-culture-parody-montage video that segued into a kick-ass eruption of time-honored crowd pleasers.

Noelle LeBlanc emerges from Damone's power-pop shadow At the risk of indulging in speculation, I'm going to presume that Noelle LeBlanc has experienced her fair share of the soul-extinguishing nihilism and corruption that live at the bottom of the music industry's digestive tract.

Kingsley Flood don't even like alt-country I tend to suspect a solid percentage of what appear to be roots-movement bands are, in fact, punk bands who realized they get taken more seriously when they play acoustic guitars and pretend they've always been huge Johnny Cash fans.